For two-and-a-half years, Emily LaBeff, chairwoman of the sociology department at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, spent 30 hours or more each week playing the online computer game Star Wars Galaxies. Not for research, but for fun.
Logging on to the game on weekends and many nights after class, LaBeff directed Athena Wavingrider, a powerful Jedi she created, through the far corners of the Star Wars universe, fighting on behalf of the Rebel Alliance against the tyranny of the Galactic Empire.
Like millions of other online gamers, LaBeff, 54, discovered a camaraderie and friendship with other players that were far more important than the play itself -- relationships that can be hard to replicate in "real life."
PHOTO: NEW YORK TIMES
"It's replaced my television time, and I don't go to the movies anymore," she said, chuckling. "I don't keep my car as clean as I used to. But it's not because of the game itself. It's because of the people."
"We all had this wonderful second life together," she added.
And now it's all gone, at least in any form that LaBeff and thousands of other veterans of the game would recognize.
Last month, LucasArts and Sony's online game division, which have jointly run Star Wars Galaxies since its introduction in 2003, suddenly turned the game upside down, making the most sweeping changes ever made to a persistent online game. ("Persistent" means that the game world is constantly running, and players may log in and out as they please.)
Unsatisfied with the product's merely moderate success, the two radically revamped the game in an attempt to appeal to a younger, more trigger-happy audience.
Previously, the game was unabashedly complicated, appealing to mature, reflex-challenged gamers with its strategic combat style and deep skill system, which allowed players to carve out profitable, powerful niches as entertainers, architects and politicians. Now the game has become self-consciously simple, with a basic point-and-click combat system that is meant to evoke the frenetic firefights of the Star Wars films.
To Sony and LucasArts, the changes are a necessary step to help the game appeal to a broader audience. (The companies do not release subscriber figures, but many gaming experts believe that before the changes, Star Wars Galaxies had about 200,000 subscribers, each paying about US$15 a month.)
But to thousands of players, the shifts have meant the destruction of online communities that they might have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours constructing.
Now many Galaxies players are canceling their accounts and migrating to other online games. They are swapping tales on "refugee" Web sites with names like Imperial Crackdown (imperialcrackdown.com).
LaBeff, for instance, said that she had canceled all three of her Galaxies accounts and had joined a new guild in World of Warcraft, another game, with her old Star Wars friends.
"Someone might wonder, well, it's just a game, what's the big deal?" said Robert Kruck, 54, an engineer for Motorola who lives in Schaumburg, Illinois, who said he had canceled seven of his eight Galaxies accounts.
"But for many people it is much more than a game," he said. "It is a part of their lives where they have invested huge amounts of time building a community. And that community has been based on a sophisticated, mature game. So now, for them to take an adult-level combat and economics simulation and turn it into a mindless game for 10-year-olds is a violation of that community."
For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more Star Wars-like, tying it more explicitly to the films.
"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts.
"There was [were] lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves," she said.
MacIntyre said Galaxies had lost "significantly more" than the 3 percent to 5 percent of players who typically leave any online game every month. She said she expected the game to return to its previous subscriber levels in six months, a process she hoped would be accelerated by the introduction of a new television infomercial hawking Galaxies later this month.
"We knew we were taking a significant risk with our existing player base, but we felt so strongly that we needed to make these changes for the sake of the game's long-term future that we all held hands, LucasArts and Sony, and went forward," she said.
It may, however, be a rocky path, because the revamped game is receiving mostly horrible reviews from players.
On Gamespot.com, a leading game Web site, about half of the more than 600 players evaluating the game have rated it "abysmal." Some 14 percent have called it "terrible," and 6 percent have described it as merely "bad." The game is described as "perfect" by about 12 percent and "other" by 18 percent.
"We just feel violated," said Carolyn Hocke, 46, a marketing Web technician for Ministry Medical Group in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Hocke said she once had as many as 10 separate Galaxies accounts but has canceled all but one in the last two weeks.
"For them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving," she said.
"They went through the astonishment and denial, then they went to the anger part of it, and now they are going through the sad and helpless part of grieving. I work in the health-care industry, and it's very similar," she said.
‘UNFRIENDLY’: Changing the nationality listing of Taiwanese residents to ‘China’ goes against EU foreign policy as well as democratic and human rights principles, MOFA said Taiwan yesterday called on Denmark to correct its designation of the nationality of Taiwanese residents as “China” or face retaliatory measures. The Danish government in 2024 changed the nationality of Taiwanese citizens on their residence permits from “Taiwan” to “China.” The decision goes against EU foreign policy and contravenes democratic and human rights principles, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesman Hsiao Kuang-wei (蕭光偉) said. Denmark should present a solution acceptable to Taiwan as soon as possible and correct the erroneous designation to preserve the longstanding friendship between the two nations, Hsiao said. The issue could damage Denmark’s image and business reputation in Taiwan,
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
Taiwan climbed to its highest position in global export rankings in more than three decades last year, buoyed by demand linked to artificial intelligence (AI) that lifted shipments of semiconductors and technology products, Ministry of Finance data released yesterday showed. Taiwan accounted for 2.4 percent of global exports last year, or about US$640 billion, ranking 12th worldwide, the data showed. That was up four places from a year earlier and marked the nation’s best ranking since 1994, the ministry said. Taiwan’s share of global exports rose by 0.5 percentage points from the previous year, the largest increase among major economies, reflecting the nation’s
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
RSS